Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
The only LLM-Based Experience^tm^ I've had so far (and probably ever) was a brief session of Death by AI I had with friends, and that game boils down to "give the chatbot a prompt and your response, and maybe try to not die horribly".
Pretty much all the fun of that game comes from giving the chatbot manmade horrors beyond its comprehension and seeing it struggle to keep up.
Novelty value is basically the only thing LLMs have going for them, and that isn't changing any time soon.
one game that could benefit from in it within a world confined framework where they couldnt break character or act like an "ai" would be something like project zomboid.
it would be funny trying to convince them they arent real, and they just flip their shit on you. like "you must have lost your mind, i dont feel safe being in your base anymore. zomboids are one thing to worry about, but dealing with a nut job with a god complex is another risk im not willing to take for me, or my family"
they could literally decide amongst themselves to leave or even kill you in mutiny or something. you could maybe convince them you are a messiah and start an end of the world cult by predicting game conditions, the lights going off, the helicopters, the TVs cutting out on specific day.
or maybe they think you are the devil leading them astray based on their randomized era accurate personality profile.
the game memorizes these moments, what you say, how they react, and creates story arcs based on it. maybe one day a survivor leaves your cult, and finds another group, but wants to save her parents. so they send a death squad over and have a jamestown moment where you can convince them all they are going to paradise if they all drink bleach together.
the possibilities would be endless.
the game memorizes these moments, what you say, how they react, and creates story arcs based on it
LLMs famously can't be consistent, so your fantasy game would have story arcs that doesn't fit together, brings back characters that are already dead as if nothing happened, and everyone would have a son named Dorian.
imagine if you read the article at all instead of posting 6 paragraphs about an impossible game you’re fantasizing about, that LLMs do nothing to enable because they’re stochastic chatbots and don’t understand game systems (just like you!)
“Hey wouldn’t a game where you just talk to chatbots be really fun???” -this fucking guy
No thanks!
I think there is some potential for LLMs in games, in the same way that a game like Façade showed potential for ... being able to create some sort of ... thing. But that would require a little bit of artistic vision and integrity, which obviously AAA studios can't have. I like the idea of games that are about navigating conversation. But I'm not sure you can ever massage a LLM into being in any way compelling—what I've seen of character·ai is pretty ghastly. Maybe only using it as a parser could work? Might as well just be ELIZA.
Anyway, this quote
“It’s very different,” Mosser said. “But for the first time in my life, I can have a conversation with a character I’ve created. I’ve dreamed of that since I was a kid.”
brings to mind a Nabokov quote I think about a lot.
INTERVIEWER:
E. M. Forster speaks of his major characters sometimes taking over and dictating the course of his novels. Has this ever been a problem for you, or are you in complete command?
NABOKOV:
My knowledge of Mr. Forster’s works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.
I think it could work as a minor gimmick, like terminal hacking minigame in fallout. You have to convince the LLM to tell you the password, or you get to talk to a demented robot whose brain was fried by radiation exposure, or the like. Relatively inconsequential stuff like being able to talk your way through or just shoot your way through.
Unfortunately this shit is too slow and too huge to embed a local copy of, into a game. You need a lot of hardware compatibility. And running it in the cloud would cost too much.
I saw that one Matrix game thing where they used AI to interact with NPCs. I think if that could be refined, it could create fantastic immersion in games.
But AI art and story writing in general is just horrible.
Most AI usage is hated but I saw a lot of people that were a fan of when Fortnite did it with the Darth Vader NPC a few weeks ago I thought it was creepy but hearing Vader talk about rizz or aura or the bite of 87 was kinda fun I guess
yeah the use case for LLMs is amusing novelty. That's why LLMs peaked with GPT-2, it was just the right amount of broken.
They also needed to rapidly rein it in after gamers got it to pull a Tay AI and start spamming slurs.